Your Yard Sale Is Illegal | Hacker News Reader

Your Yard Sale Is Illegal

reason.com

28 pointsFlemlord32 comments

You can no longer sell at a yard sale:

* Products that have been recalled by CPSC.

* Toys and other articles intended for use by children, and any furniture, with paint or other surface coatings containing lead over specified amounts.

* Products primarily intended for children age 12 or younger with lead content over a specific amount.

* Certain toys or child care articles that contain any one of six prohibited chemicals known as phthalates, which are primarily used as plasticizers.

* Other products that violate CPSC’s safety standards, bans, rules or regulations or otherwise present a substantial product hazard.

It's hard for me to get worked up about this. Even harder with the bait-y title.

My understanding is that, while you are technically correct about some details, the larger point is that the law presumes your goods to be dangerous until you do testing to prove those goods to NOT have the characteristics described above. Hence, for a yard sale, it would be infeasible to sell old toys as the testing would cost more than any conceivable gains.

I'm assuming that the author of the linked stub was going to address this in the full article he mentioned.

Like all the members of Congress who voted on this though, I'll admit to not having actually read the full 63-page bill and the thousands of pages of existing law that it references, extends, and amends. So if I'm categorically wrong, and you've fully read and understood the consequences of the law, please set me straight.

I am clear on the fact that this law has been a serious concern for small manufacturers, though I presume they could fall under more onerous regulation than yard sales.

What makes Reason's case even weaker is that their evidence is a very readable guidebook aimed at laypeople, not some subtle clause buried in a 200-page bill.

Not to change the terms of the debate, but you know, at the end of the day, it's a bit tyrannical that a person should be expected to consult anything from Washington DC to hold a yard sale.

So you'd be cool with people selling patent medicines and shark-fin cancer cures too, I take it? We'll have to agree to disagree.

Do you really think people need Ted Kennedy, Barbara Boxer, or John Boehner to command them from on-high in Washington DC on how to morally conduct commerce?

Fraud is a crime. Cities have been dealing with it for a long time. People don't need bureaucrats in DC to tell them to not stick jellybeans up their nose.

nope.

on the first substantive page, in big bold text, it says

"You are not required to test your products for safety."

Thanks for finding these details. I subscribed to Reason for a while, and ended my subscription because of their tendency to sensationalize things by leaving out details like these.

If you've never come across it before, you should really read Joel Salatin's "Everything I Want to Do is Illegal," a farmer's perspective on how regulations crowd out local and organic farmers, destroy farming communities, favor industrialized monoculture-based agriculture, and generally make life less pleasant:

http://www.acresusa.com/toolbox/reprints/Salatin_Sept03.pdf

He also has a book:

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Want-Do-Illegal-Stories/dp/...

This is a good article, and the consensus among food writers, reporters, scholars and enthusiasts is clearly that much of western food/agri regulation is wrongheaded (note that even "enlightened" continental Europe retains some of the US's signature bonehead moves, like bans on young raw milk cheese).

That fact does not, however, indict the whole concept of regulation. Nobody is making a case for why yard sales should sell recalled or contaminated toys.

It does indict the idea that we can just wave regulation at a problem and solve it.

Think I'm making a strawman? Oh, how I wish I was. A challenge for you, the reader: Over the next month, keep track of how many times someone calls for "more regulation" in some form, without putting one word into actually saying what that regulation might actually be, which would certainly be the bare-minimum requirement for examining it for second-order effects or other problems. Once you start looking for this, you see it's not the exception, it's the norm... and the laws we get out of Congress certainly reflect this.

It's transparently irrational to call for "more regulation" with no further elaboration, but it happens all the damn time.

It's funny that you'd talk about "straw men" in this response, which addresses neither a call for more regulation nor an plea for regulation in the abstract.

Nope. I jumped in. But it's as generally related to the topic as your reply, which was about as direct a reaction to tc's post as mine is to yours.

A lengthy section of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (http://www.michaelpollan.com/omnivore.php) is devoted to Joel Salatin and his farm, as well.

These laws cover yard sales because there are people who obtain mass amounts of recalled goods and try to sell them to the public through these venues. Some people find them in the trash or on the curb, others are employees of companies that are supposed to dispose of the items, but instead give them to family members to sell. So be wary next time you go to a yard sale and see someone selling 45 brand-new strollers..

This is true. I used to work for a company that would assign coupons to shoppers based on their shopping history. One of our biggest hurdles was avoiding people who would, in a sense, reverse engineer our coupon dispersion so that they could purchase large quantities of various products.

In the end we ended up having an employee become a member of the sites and forums where these people hung out and to attempt to cutoff these types of scams before they got out of hand. But it was normal for someone to have store managers orders cases of non-perishable items that were bought on a buy-one-get-one deal. People would also purchase items on coupons and then return them at a later time for full value or store credit. It was amazing to see. Many of these people would resell these items at garage/yard sales or on ebay.

The handbook referenced by the article does NOT say that yard sales are illegal. It just says that yard sales are regulated by laws. There are certain things you can't sell at yard sales, specifically "potentially hazardous products".

Now I haven't read the handbook, but if you're going to say that the law prevents you from selling used books / old toys, you should probably cite the law that says that.

I assume the poker games I play for money are too. We're all criminals! It would be kind of interesting to see a list of laws we all break but that aren't enforced (and I don't mean the ridiculous ones against sodomy, etc).

This is one of the reasons I'm concerned about automatic enforcement of laws such as speeding (either by numberplate recognition and calculating average speed, or by devices fitted to cars).

There's a disconnect between the image everyone presents and reality. Nobody breaks the speed limit of course, that would be illegal. Yet everyday I head down the motorway and there are dozens or hundreds of cars and virtually none of them are at or within the speed limit (er, except me, natch').

There will be a big nationwide shift in driving styles and patterns and public feeling if such systems come into force, and for all the talk of fines and revenue and road safety, there's no public discussion about the real implications because nobody is going to be the one to accuse most of the country of speeding.

It would be interesting to see what life would be like if nobody broke any of the laws that "everyone" breaks. Officially it would be the same since lawbreakers are few and far between, but ... would it really?

    Yet everyday I head down the motorway and there are dozens or hundreds of cars and
    virtually none of them are at or within the speed limit (er, except me, natch').

Depending on what state or jurisdiction you're in, you could have said this and made an even stronger point...

    Yet everyday I head down the motorway and there are dozens or hundreds of cars and
    virtually none of them are at or within the speed limit (*including me*, because if I
    drove the posted limit, I'd get pulled over for *obstructing traffic*!).

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted and you create a nation of law-breakers and then you cash in on guilt.

This is less an interesting comment than it is a My Chemical Romance song. I also note that you've ignored a few of the other powers governments have, like deciding how much fat a steak needs to have before it can be called "Prime", or generating statistics on the number of businesses operating in 2003 with 50-99 employees.

I won't deny that Rand was totally Emo. But regulatory power boils down to the power to imprison those who refuse to comply.

Know what? You run a red light and crash into my car or start firing a pistol in random directions because you don't feel like complying, your ass needs to be imprisoned.

did you recently learn how to read?

The point I was trying to make, which for whatever reason seems to escape you, is that a regulation need not be an unnecessary creation of a malevolent government, as dictated by your original quote. Nor is the power of enforcement of such regulation with imprisonment necessarily bad, as you allude in the gp of this post. Indeed, if it cannot be enforced there is no reason to create it.

Hope that clears things up a bit for you.

um...I think you missed the point of the original. The point is that people presume that government is benevolent. Doing things for the public good is their job description after all. This presumption is false, as when you examine the incentives for government you find tendencies directly inimical to the public good.

Libertarians aren't anarchists.

While the laws may have that effect, I doubt that's why we have the laws that we do. There are a ton of examples like speeding, gambling, and recreational drug use where laws are not uniformly enforced. I think the cause is a combination of a slow-moving bureaucratic system and a mentality of trusting the discretion of judges and law enforcement in knowing where to draw the line.

I'm not saying that broad laws with selective enforcement is the right way to go, just that the cause is probably not a conspiracy or even an uncoordinated effort to give the government more power.

"Hereby it is manifest, that during the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man."

(snip)

"To this warre of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law: where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in warre the two Cardinall vertues. Justice, and Injustice are none of the Faculties neither of the Body, nor Mind. If they were, they might be in a man that were alone in the world, as well as his Senses, and Passions. They are Qualities, that relate to men in Society, not in Solitude. It is consequent also to the same condition, that there be no Propriety, no Dominion, no Mine and Thine distinct; but onely that to be every mans that he can get; and for so long, as he can keep it. And thus much for the ill condition, which man by meer Nature is actually placed in; though with a possibility to come out of it, consisting partly in the Passions, partly in his Reason."

For those who are considering replying, that's a (uncited) quote from Atlas Shrugged.

We had a couple resale/used children's stores here in town that went out of business because of these same regulations.

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